Reborn Healer Chapter 46

Almost all of Watson's left leg had been affected from thigh to ankle, and it had started to spread up towards his abdomen. It hadn't crossed over to his right side yet, but even as I watched, it was actively growing.

“What happened? When did it get worse?” I asked. All my humor had fled me. This was serious, and the healer most qualified to deal with it wasn't here.

There had been a couple of occasions where I hadn't been able to save someone, but those people had already been dead by the time they got to the clinic. I couldn't start letting people down again now.

“I was telling you that they have those strange weapons,” the first warrior, whose name I still didn't even know, said. “Watson here got hit by one of those. He was caught at the edge of the blast range. Everyone else who got hit in that blast died.”

Well, shit. I had been quietly hoping that this could be explained some other way. Even if there had been some new type of infection that I hadn't been aware of on Earth and hadn't learned about yet during my six years as a physician here, it would have been better than that.

You wanted to learn what your connection was with Neferi, I told myself darkly. Sometimes you get what you ask for.

“You say it's been a few days since your sortie,” I said out loud, trying to figure out some way, any way I could stop this. “How did you treat it then? I'm guessing it wasn't spreading like this.”

“He was bleeding a lot, so we tied the leg off,” he said. “No healer for us meant all we could do was try and keep him alive the old-fashioned way. It worked. The leg looked dead, and there was no healer or witch doctor willing to try putting it back together. Eventually, we figured we might as well just cut it off and have a healer finish it.”

“I'm scared,” Watson said, sounding vaguely delirious already. “Those other guys didn't die easy. They died screaming. Hacking the black stuff out of their lungs.”

“You're going to be okay,” I lied. “Just calm down and we’ll get this sorted.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Watson said. “I…”

He didn't get another word out, unguardedly falling into a deep sleep as I cast Anesthesia on him.

“He wasn't in pain when the leg was tied off?” I asked. “I saw in his bloodstream you've given him any amount of… I'd call it an amphetamine, I think it’s…”

“Pixie dust,” the bigger man supplied. “Makes you go loopy, but it keeps you from feeling the pain.”

“I'm assuming it wasn't on that before.”

The big guy shook his head.

“Okay.” I sucked in a deep breath. “You're going to need to be real cool with this. I’m going to amputate his leg and probably butcher him a bit.”

“You want to cut off all of the plague,” he surmised. “Yes?”

“I don’t know if I would call it plague, but yes,” I said. “It’s not something I can heal.”

“Do what you have to do,” he replied, steel in his voice. “Is there anything I can help with?”

I considered the situation, eyeing the steel spreading darkness within Watson's veins. “Not in the operation, but any information you have would be good.”

“I don't have much,” he said. “We were hauling ass.”

“Then wait outside,” I decided. “This is going to get messy, and I work better without an audience.”

“Yes, sir,” the warrior acknowledged me, hastily retreating.

“All right,” I muttered to myself. “What the fuck are we doing here?”

The first order of business was to keep this from spreading further. It was already killing everything it touched, and it was progressing faster than any illness I'd seen could. It was behaving more like a poison than anything else, but I decided I could leave classification until after I treated him.

Okay. “Treat” was a strong word. There was a very good chance he would die from what I was about to do before Neferi’s weapon could do him in.

No time to waste. I started by tracing a line in his skin with a scalpel, drawing out the marks I wanted to cut. I was going to eliminate a bit of healthy flesh as well, cutting off his leg entirely, as well as part of his hip and even some of his side. It would very nearly be a lethal injury, but I would rather do that than have to operate a second time if the darkness spread past where I wanted to cut.

Deep breath, I told myself, falling into the comfortable hyperfocus of Harmonic Awareness.

I stepped up on a stool in order to get the correct angle, and in one precise motion, I cut everything I needed to.

Harmonic Awareness lvl 1 -> 2

Nightmare Forged lvl 9 -> 10

I even imbued my spear with the Nightmare Forged skill. Doing so had generally allowed me to weaken enemies further and therefore kill them more easily, but it also gave me a degree of control over the wound I was making. Right now, I wanted to do as little damage as possible while cleanly severing everything, and the shadow magic packed into the tip of the spear provided just a tiny boost.

Before I was even done slicing, I started healing. At Adept-tier, this was absolutely not the kind of problem I was supposed to be able to treat. With my spear, I had severed part of Watson’s pelvis as well as the entirety of his leg. If I had wanted to do a very quick reattachment job, I might have been able to, but regenerating everything was impossible.

I pumped heal after heal into the enormous wound, sealing it as quickly as I could. In order to free up more mana with which to spam those heals, I dropped the anesthesia that Watson had been under.

Small mercies. He had lost enough blood in the last five seconds that he was still unconscious when the spell dropped.

Blood spilled over my gloved hands and onto my arms as I applied a regenerative agent made from a combination of nightrose powder and liferoot paste. Combined, those two were usually used to help me repair scarred or burnt skin. Now, I used their stimulated biomass and replicated it with regenerative energy, spreading it across the wound I’d opened.

It was a patchwork fix. I didn't have a specific spell to seal major injuries like my father did—that came at Master, and I hadn't reached the level of mana comprehension nor the raw power required to use them. Instead, I gained an increased understanding of his body and what was happening to it by positioning myself right next to the butchered man, allowing my Harmonic Awareness to take in his body as well as mine.

A thin layer of artificial skin patched over what I cut out. It was good that I'd been decisive when I had. Any longer and I would have been forced to cut through a major organ, and I had no way of regrowing them.

But this wouldn't last either. As a best guess, I was going to have to continually apply the Heal spell with as much power as I could muster every couple of minutes or this would burst open. For the time being, the restorative power of my spells was taking the place of blood and bone to keep Watson alive.

While I couldn't regrow limbs, I could reattach body parts. I'd done it to myself a number of times by now. My plan of action now was to take the still bleeding, still blackened part of his body I chopped off, amputate the worst of the diseased portions away, and at least regenerate enough that I could get his torso functional again.

I had admittedly been a bit scatterbrained trying to keep Watson alive, and I still had to dedicate a portion of my focus to it, which didn't make it any easier to do what came next. The operating bed, as well as the ground and most of my body, was soaked a bright red. To my embarrassment, the part of Watson I'd cut off was in the mess… somewhere

“I should have got a damn box,” I said to myself, shaking my head.

Thanks to Harmonic Awareness, locating the limb and piece of torso combo was pretty easily accomplished. Grabbing it was a little more awkward since I had to keep physical contact with Watson in order to keep casting Heal into his unconscious body.

I wish I could say I came up with some intelligent solution or had the wherewithal to use my skills to their utmost to maneuver my way over, but what really happened was I dragged the chunk of flesh over with the blunt end of my spear.

“Well, that's the easy part done,” I said to myself again, hoping nobody was listening. “Here we go.”

Keeping a hand on three-fourths of Watson, I grabbed the other quarter of him and got it up onto the stool, where I could operate on it. I was very grateful I was wearing gloves.

After a quick Create Water to get the worst of the gore off the gloved hand I was going to be using, as well as my scalpel, I started cutting.

Horrifyingly, the darkness still seemed to be spreading.

It defied the logic I had learned of spells that applied to living matter. That was because, I guessed, it wasn't a spell. Though it had been created by a mage in my memories, it was still being used well after her death. Its foundation was in magic, but there was something else here.

Another question for later.

The leg itself was a lost cause. All I wanted to do was get to the point where Watson was only missing a leg, which would mean he could at the very least survive. I switched to my spear to cut off the actual leg, leaving myself with a trunk of bone and meat I’d taken from his torso.

Carefully, I cut out the parts that had been darkened, which was only doable thanks to Harmonic Awareness because of how much blood I was covering it in.

I couldn't heal something that had been removed from the body, but I could reattach this chunk of flesh to him and reintegrate it using healing spells, then repair that part while dissolving the artificial barrier I had created, and then finally fill in the chunks I had just cut out.

Body Scan also didn't work on dead flesh, but I double-checked the patchwork Frankensteined mess I’d made of his torso. It was looking bad, but the parts of him I was holding together with my magic reported red at worst. That part was dying, not already dead.

I started the process of healing the chunk of Watson that resembled raw meat more than anything human back onto his torso, and my Danger Sense suddenly screamed at me.

I flinched back, but I had to keep contact with him in order to ensure he didn't die on the spot. Though my Danger Sense told me where the danger was coming from, I couldn't get a clear enough read on what it was.

Afterwards, I would realize that I just hadn't been thorough enough even with Harmonic Awareness. This plague, so to speak, was capable of manifesting itself even in very small quantities—amounts that would require my full focus in order to detect.

A thin, midnight black thread burst out from within the body chunk I was attaching, my awareness finally catching it as it tore free and targeted not Watson but the hand with which I was casting the healing spell.

I abruptly cut off the process, but it had already found its target. The darkness hit the tip of my glove and burned straight through it, drilling into my index finger.

A sharp pain seared through my hand. I had the presence of mind to yank the glove off, switch hands, and continue the life support I had been giving Watson.

The glove had been soaked through so thoroughly that even under it, my hand was covered in blood, but I could see distinctly the vein in my finger blistering black. While the pain wasn’t as bad as the one generated from the torture spell Thaddeus had hit me with, it was a unique sensation, to say the least.

Unique, but somehow familiar. I hadn’t experienced the effects of Neferi’s weapon in the memory capsules, not even the one where she’d released a massive wave of it when she’d been executed, so it couldn’t have been from there. Where was it from?

My instinctive Heal had to be split two ways, once into Watson’s body and once into my own finger. The restorative energy clashed with the darkness in my vein and fizzled out.

Danger Sense was still warning me about it, which I thought was a bit unnecessary. I knew just how bad this could get thanks to the cut-open man on my operation table and at least a gallon of blood. Still, I made the extra effort to Body Scan myself to determine how far it had gotten so I could tell if I was going to have to lose a finger or not.

Every single bit of Watson that had been affected by the plague had immediately turned black in my Body Scan, designating it as unsaveable. I had expected much the same from my own, but to my surprise, the area where the plague curled inside my index finger was only a light yellow.

That still wasn’t promising, but it did mean I could avoid immediate amputation. Now that I had visual on it, I could even see that it wasn’t spreading nearly as fast in my finger as it had in Watson.

What was different between him and me? Did it lose efficacy when spreading to other people? Come to think of it, why hadn’t it spread earlier? It had targeted my casting hand. Was it drawn to mana? Maybe healing spells specifically, since it hadn’t done so earlier?

Too many variables, too many things to think about.

I decided against cutting the finger off unless it got worse. For the time being, I needed to reassess what I was doing with this healing process.

This time, I double-checked the piece of torso, doing a deeper scan for pieces of the plague, then started the process over again. Just to be safe, I pushed the deadened leg even further away from me, keeping it away from me in case spellcasting was what triggered it to bounce from person to person.

It didn’t try jumping at me as I started to magically glue Watson’s body back onto him, though, which I took as a good sign. Once I was actually able to work without interference, it was simple enough to reassemble.

There were still issues with this situation, of course. First and foremost amongst them were the fact that I had just cut out a few chunks of what I was going to restore to him.

Fortunately, now that I had the connection firmly established, the barrier dissolving, I could restore them with the same generalized Heal spell I’d been using.

Except, as the revitalizing energy passed through the area, it simply swirled around on the inside. The spell hadn’t failed or anything, but the plagued parts weren’t healing at all. The rest of him was steadily stabilizing now that there was more than a stopgap holding him together, but he wasn’t reaching a stage where I could just stop because parts of him just weren’t getting better.

It was then that I had two realizations back-to-back.

The reason why I had some familiarity with this magic was because I had a direct connection to an entire divine being-slash-plane of existence that had exerted a pressure on me that Neferi’s plague inside me was similar to. Not only that, I’d spent years growing up next to two people who both had that same kind of crushing presence.

The Nightmare.

And as to the effects that separated this from some regular poison or chemical attack… I couldn’t heal it. Within Watson’s body, the parts that had been affected by the plague were completely unaffected by the revitalizing energy I’d poured into it.

That was, to say the least, terrible. I had already made allowances for weird shit it was doing, but this was a step too far for me to finish this heal.

“Hey, uh, what was your name again?” I called out to the next room.

Fortunately, the first mercenary hadn’t left the clinic proper, and he heard me easily.

“Cale!” Matias called out. “His name’s Cale!”

I started. He was still here? Huh. That was nice of him. I’d been cooped up in the operation room the entire day, so I hadn’t gone out to check.

“Okay, well, since you’re both out there,” I said, “I need a few things.”

“Whatever you need, doc,” he replied.

“I’ll do what I can,” Cale added.

“I need everyone who has some level of plague infection. Cale knows what I mean. Do not let them take off any tourniquets or anything similar. They need to be ready for amputations.”

“I can do that,” Cale said. “Anything else?”

“You just go and do that,” I said. “Matias. Do you have any idea of how you can reach Vallis?”

“Not sure. I can try a few spots, but I can’t guarantee anything.”

“I need more healers,” I said. “Someone stronger than me. Doesn’t matter the cost. I also need someone with good protective gear who can manage potentially infected biomatter and put it in one of the designated boxes.”

“I can do that,” Matias volunteered. “I don’t know about Vallis, but I’m sure someone here has an idea.”

“Alright,” I said. “Get whoever you can going. And make sure everyone who shows signs of black veins gets in here. Everyone else is going to have to come back another day. This is priority number one.”

While I was still hesitant to call it a plague, that was what everyone else had called it so far, and I was starting to understand where the naming convention had come from. Left unchecked, it was very possible this could spread, and an unhealable, fast-acting, lethal disease was nothing short of disastrous.

“Heard loud an’ clear,” Matias said, footsteps growing louder as he approached the room. “Jus’ gonna check in on…”

His voice trailed off as he opened the door and looked into what could only aptly be described as a horror show. Blood splattered me, the ground, and my slightly dismembered patient. A detached, plague-ridden leg twitched slightly on the ground.

The weathered dungeon diver stumbled back, visibly paling. He held both hands up to his mouth like he was about to puke.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I also need a mop.”